![]() Apart from the opportunity for Yannis Thavoris to produce attractive sets (a mountain panorama running across the length of the stage), the updating added nothing to the drama and made parts of the action unclear: why should a Mexican bandit be hanging around a nuclear-testing camp? More significantly, it detracted from Puc-cini’s distinctive taste for injecting his music with local idioms – a feature of his major operas whether they are set in America, Paris, Nagasaki or Peking. The gold-diggers became members of Camp Rock, a nuclear-testing site Minnie, owner of the Golden Nugget Gambling Hall and magnificently costumed as a cowgirl, became a kind of Girl of the Atomic Bomb. ![]() Stephen Barlow’s new Opera Holland Park production transposed the ac-tion from 1850s California to 1950s Nevada. Puccini’s interest in Debussy is evident from the whole tone chords and unresolved dissonances, and there is more than a hint of Wagnerism in the orchestral leitmotivs that delineate the central characters, and in the towering figure of Minnie who vocally and dramati-cally resembles a sort of Wild West Brünnhilde (there is, in fact, a deliber-ate echo of Die Walküre in Act 2). In letters to his publisher Giulio Ricordi the composer referred to it as ‘a sec-ond Bohème, but more vigorous, more daring, and on an altogether larger scale.’ The daring lies in the movement away from the conventional musi-cal structures of Italian opera. ![]() Except for the tenor’s plea on the scaffold near the end of the opera, there are no set-piece arias. Despite this, it’s never held a secure place in the repertory, partly one suspects because it is the most through-composed of all Puccini’s operas. Premièred at the Metropolitan Opera, New York on 10 December 1910, with a cast led by Enrico Caruso, Emmy Destinn and Pasquale Amato, under the baton of Arturo Toscanini, it was a huge success. ![]() La Fanciulla del West – or ‘The Girl’, as Puccini referred to it – was, like Madama Butterfly, based on a play by the American dramatist David Belas-co. Gioachino Rossini, Il Barbiere di Siviglia ![]()
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